Rex Dickens, Senior Solutions Engineer
Rex was in charge of a district with 4,000 Chromebooks and 3 or 4,000 desktops and had access to all the servers, all the switches, all the networks, all of the external services.
How does he keep all of that straight? He never lets any of his devices remember his passwords. He carries around a booklet that has every single one of his passwords. He can hand it to anybody on the planet, anytime of the day and it won’t mean a thing to any of them. It is essentially encrypted.
Basically, you use something that is unique to you. And for that, we go back to psychology and we use something called word association. As an exact example for that, let's use a simple word like the word, “DATE”. Now when you say that word, something popped into your head, and was the foremost thought in your brain. Maybe that was a day, maybe that was a person.
Let's say that you decide to create a new password. And today is a very important date, so you decide to use that number. That's the most important number you can imagine. You write down the word “date: as part of you password. And what that really translates into is seven, one, seven, two, zero, two, zero (from July 17, 2020.)
Maybe then you take a childhood nickname of one of your friends. His name is David. His nickname is Shaba. You use one or the other and you write down one that immediately associates to you, the other. Now you have a password Shaba7172020. That's a relatively reasonable password. And what's written down in your book is “David plus date”. Now, you can hand that to any person on the planet and it will mean absolutely nothing.
So you can create a system like that in a room full of teachers and it will be different for every single one of them. And that will allow them to do things like write down their password and still keep it secure.